The New York Times published "The Evolution of the God Gene" by Nicholas Wade in which we are told that, "religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning it exists because it was favored by natural selection." We are further informed that religion is "universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland." There is a certain plausibility to Wade's arguments that religion is hard-wired into our brain via natural selection, making it almost 'natural'.

Jeff Schweitzer, a neurobiologist, takes issue with Wade's interpretation in a Huffington Post piece. This is entitled "The Fallacy of the God Gene".